Do I owe Ron DeSantis an apology?

[For the record, none of this applies to Michael Hiltzik, who pushed back on the standard narrative from day one.]

Andrew Gelman pushed back on my recent post about Ron DeSantis.

It seems to me that you're overstating your case. You say that DeSantis is "devoid of political talent." The fact that someone was nominated by a major party for governor of a competitive state, not to mention winning the election, that's a signal that he has _some_ political talent, no? I can buy the argument that DeSantis had some good luck, but "devoid of political talent"??

And, yes, Gelman does have a point.

For starters, absolute statements about people's character or abilities are almost always hyperbole to some degree. I probably should have been more careful with my language and I almost certainly should have added a couple of qualifiers.

First, when I talk about political talent, what I had in mind was the interpersonal side of the job, the ability to relate comfortably to people, move a crowd with the speech, show some charisma and stage presence. Obviously, there's a lot more to politics than that, and I should have been more clear.

Second, we are talking about the big leagues here. What constitutes practically no talent depends heavily on the standards of comparison. Just as the best performer in your community theater group would look hapless on the Broadway stage, Ron DeSantis shows few discernible gifts for the public facing side of politics compared to what we normally see on this level.

I don't want to spend too much time on examining Ron DeSantis's political career and what was behind it, been there done that, but it is worth taking a couple of minutes to look at 2018 and 2020. The margin a victory in the latter was substantial, but not particularly out of line with what we would expect given the makeup of the state and given that it has become ground central for the MAGA movement.

In the general election of 2018 he won by a fraction of a percent against a flawed Democratic candidate in a reddish purple state. Arguably, the one recent campaign where he overperformed was the 2018 primary and as much as one hates to concede a point to Donald Trump, the primary driver of that victory seems to be the decision to attach himself to the then president like a remora.

And if that categorization seems a bit unfair, watch the clip.

But all of this is straying from the main point. Politics is very much a field where it's better to be lucky than good and mediocre politicians catch favorable winds all the time. There's nothing very interesting about that part of the story, nor, at this point, is there anything particularly controversial about it. Here's how NYT columnist and reliable team player, Frank Bruni recently described watching DeSantis campaign. [Emphasis added.]

From the breathless media coverage of Ron DeSantis’s recent visits to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, you could easily get the impression that:

• Voting starts in approximately five minutes.

• You’re really watching a new Netflix series about a body snatcher’s attempts to pantomime just enough humanity to amass power on Planet Earth.

• The Florida governor’s entire candidacy hinges on his wife, Casey DeSantis.

Bruni is one of the guys you go to for a consensus opinion and he is definitely delivered here. Suddenly everyone seems to have discovered that DeSantis isn't very good at this whole politics thing. Here's another recent opinion piece by Bruni that makes the same point at greater length. And since we're talking about standard narratives, we have to quote Politico.

For some time now she’s been seen mostly and by many as an absolute superstar of a political spouse, a not so “secret weapon,” even something like his saving grace — an antidote for her sometimes awkward husband, social in a way that he is not, charismatic in a way that he is not, generally and seemingly at ease in the spotlight in a way that he so often and so evidently is not.

The article later goes on to discuss "the perception of a novice, faltering DeSantis that’s also visible in a slide in early primary polls," and suggest the Casey is actually the brains behind the campaign.

I'm not sure I'd assign any value to the Politico piece as journalism -- there is usually little to be learned from juicy off-the-record quotes presumably from sources with axes to grind -- but as a gauge of conventional wisdom it's hard to beat.

I read the Bruni piece on first wives and skimmed the Politico profile of Casey DeSantis and I'm reasonably sure I managed to cull everything of value. There's nothing there that justifies the time it would take to read them. The only interesting aspect here is the complete and completely unacknowledged reversal in the narrative. [note to Andrew Gelman: yes, someone out there probably did acknowledge it but I don't personally know of an exception and I really liked that sentence.] 

For more than a year, the NYT, Politico and all the usual suspect, palpably delighted to have a leading Republican contender with Ivy League manners who didn't put ketchup on his steak, wrote article after article (some as late as this February) about how DeSantis was an unstoppable force. Now history has changed. We have always been at war with Eastasia and Ron DeSantis has always been bad at politics.